Summers can be the best times of a students life. They get a break from the stress and anxiety of school and they are allowed to do any and all things they wish to do within the legal limits. Summer projects are designed to keep students engaged and learning. This can be a very good thing as long as the project is based on a topic that the student actually enjoys and will be motivated to complete. Students struggle staying engaged enough during the school year, adding a project during the time they are meant to go be kids should be handled very carefully. If they want the projects to be successful they must set a broad topic and allow the students to chose anything they want under that umbrella topic. Students will enjoy doing a project about a certain YouTube creator they have fun watching, a sports team they love, or even their favorite book they read during school or over summer break. These projects should not be based around a Shakespeare play that they struggle to even read let alone comprehend. Summer projects are a good idea as long as they are handled well.

Assigning a project to a kid during the two and a half month break they get is something that needs to be handled very carefully. Learning is very important and having the project is a good idea. The students must be able to choose exactly what they want to do. This will keep them interested in the project which will make all the grades of the projects go up compared to if it was a topic they have no interest in. The students will use more of their time to perfect the project instead of waiting until the last weekend and just turning it in because they do not care about the topic and do not want to waste their time on something that has no impact on their future as soon as they finish the next test they have on the topic. Allowing the students to pick and choose their topic will help them learn about their team, person, idea, etc. without making them feel the stress and anxiety of a teacher assigned school project.

Projects picked by a student may even result in more knowledge being gained than a teacher assigned project. Students could focus on a sports team and how they network their team to different audiences in different ways. For example, mascots are normally focused on the younger audience. Teams almost always have a promotion for the first certain number of people that arrive. The first one thousand people to go through the security gates get a free t-shirt or the first fifty fans to arrive get a jersey. Marketing and understanding how to focus products to a certain group of people is so important. My dream school, Virginia Tech, has promotions every basketball game that if the opposing team misses two free throws in a row the entire crowd gets a voucher for free bacon. This encourages all Hokie fans to be as loud as possible to mess with the mental mindset of the opposing teams shooter. A majority of jobs and careers that are pursued must have a way of marketing or selling their product so this is a very important skill for kids to have that they would not other wise be able to understand if they had to read a Shakespeare book followed by a five pager paper.

Having a teacher assigned project does have an upside. This will give the students structure and something to base their project on instead of having all the options in the world and not being able to choose one. In school, students are normally more prepared if it is a topic they have been learning about and have background knowledge on compared to a project half way through a topic, or even towards the beginning. If students are given a short book or even a PowerPoint on the topic at hand they will be more successful in completing their project.

A student lead project during the summer is a great thing it keeps the mind or a student engaged with out boring them. Students can research any and all topics they would like so that they enjoy keeping their brain working and focused on bettering themselves. Teacher based projects will give the students structure but will leave them feeling not engaged because the topic is not something they will necessarily enjoy. The idea of a student based project is a good idea and should be created to help the minds and bodies of the students.                               